A day after details leaked of the league’s work with focus groups to shape its message during the month-old NHL lockout, Gary Bettman made his best public relations move of the summer and fall by bringing a new CBA proposal to Toronto on Tuesday to present to the NHLPA.

“A lot of you know we don’t negotiate publicly, and I’m not going to break that habit because I don’t think it’s constructive,” Bettman said before negotiating publicly. “The fact of the matter is, we offered a 50-50 share of (hockey-related revenue between owners and players), and we believe we addressed the concern that players have about what happens to their salaries as a result in this year of reducing the percentage from 57 to 50 percent.

“Beyond that, I don’t want to get into the substance other than to say we believe that this was a fair offer for a long-term deal, and it’s one that we hope gets a positive reaction so that we can drop the puck on Nov. 2.”

John Shannon of the Canadian network Sportsnet got into the substance, reporting that the NHL proposed an eight-year wait for players to reach unrestricted free agency, a maximum contract length of five seasons and keeping entry-level contracts at three years.

Then came a potential poison pill, as Shannon reported that salaries for NHL players in the AHL would be included in salary cap calculations. That might as well be called the Wade Redden Rule—the New York Rangers have kept the defenseman (and his $6.5 million salary cap hit) in the minors for the past two seasons.

How would the NHL preserve players’ current paychecks while counting more players’ salaries against a lower cap? TSN’s Darren Dreger reported that money would be deferred, a quick-and-dirty solution, but certainly one that still ensures existing contracts are honored.

By addressing the major issue of guarantees on existing contracts, and by putting a reasonable-sounding main number of 50-50 out there, the NHL scored a big PR victory, reshaped the conversation and made Luntz, quite literally, yesterday’s news.

Regardless of the NHL’s motivation for making a liar out of deputy commissioner Bill Daly, who had repeatedly insisted that the league was waiting for the players to make the next move, Tuesday’s offer does represent a new starting point for negotiations, with Bettman putting a clock on the whole thing by proposing a Nov. 2 start to a full 82-game season.

The ball is now squarely in Donald Fehr’s court, and while he did not reject the NHL’s new proposal out of hand—a good sign—he also was not doing cartwheels in front of NHLPA headquarters. While the NHL has made incremental improvements to its initial offer, Fehr and his union now have to decide whether a potential shift in public opinion is worth giving the owners what most observers believe Bettman was really after all along.

There is Bettman’s genius: By holding out until now to ask for what he really wants, to put a true first offer on the table rather than the wish lists the NHL has previously trotted out, he looks reasonable. And by putting a 10-day shelf life on the offer, Bettman addresses what has been a major annoyance for the league—the NHLPA slow-playing negotiations all summer long, going back to waiting a full month to make a counterproposal after the NHL came to the table with its initial desires.

It is a tricky spot for the NHLPA, because if the players really just want to play, this is their chance to do so. The question that the players have to face is whether it is worth sacrificing the future in the name of the present, or the other way around. Factor in three months (and years before that) of building distrust for Bettman and the owners, and you can see that it’s premature to start canceling non-hockey plans for the first weekend of November.

“A pure 50/50 split represents a $1.3B transfer of revenue from players to owners over 6 yrs not factoring in any revenue growth at all,” agent Allan Walsh, one of ownership’s most vocal critics throughout negotiations, tweeted. He also sarcastically termed the deferred payments on existing contracts “a players loan.”

Other agents who spoke to Sporting News were not as instantly and militantly opposed to the new proposal, either unsure how to react without the full details, or seeing it as what it seems to be: a new starting point for negotiations that doubles as a strong public relations move.

What we still don’t know is whether the NHL’s offer was flexible, or whether it was of the take-it-or-leave-it variety, and the answer to that is what will determine if there really is going to be an 82-game season.